Page 25 of Grave Flowers
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. Aeric hadn’t undermined me, and he’d helped the family at the same time.
“No need,” he said. “You may run your chambers however you wish.”
How strange it was to have someone grant you authority. In Radix, power was a limited resource for which everyone scrambled. Oncesecured, no one dared give it up or vest it in anyone else. I nodded, feeling thankful, confused, and awkward all at once. I switched my goblet to my other hand, determined to regain my composure and naturally move the conversation to Inessa’s death. Bizarrely, that seemed safer than whatever this conversation was.
“I admit, I may have been too impatient with Decima. As you might imagine, I am mourning my sister,” I said. “I was wondering if you might tell me about Inessa’s last days.” I already knew she’d visited the garden, but who else had she seen, and what else had she done? “It would bring me comfort to know. What were they like?”
Aeric was silent. Perhaps I’d pushed him away too much by laughing at him. I waited, dread building with each passing moment. Finally, he said, “When Inessa was here, she spent much of her time in her chambers. Then, after the betrothal service, she asked to tour the garden. It was where she tried our flower berry, which is called flora 1.393.”
Abruptly, he extended the wine bottle and poured more into my chalice. I smiled in gratitude and took a sip in a show of appreciation, trying to keep things pleasant between us.
“She asked to visit the garden? After spending much of her time in solitude?” So Inessa had requested to tour the garden. Perhaps it was inconsequential, and she had simply been bored but … perhaps someone or something had prompted her to do so.
“I suggested we visit the solarium, but she insisted. I assumed it was because she missed the Radixan royal garden.”
I barely suppressed a snort of disagreement. Inessa would’ve never missed our garden. The reason I loved our grave flowers—the fact they were uncontrollable—was exactly what Inessa had hated about them. If something couldn’t be bent to her will, she loathed it, as though it’d deprived her of owed capital and thus deserved to be destroyed. A pang struck my heart. Inessa might not have missed our grave flowers, but I did. Very much so.
“I don’t believe I offered you my condolences,” Aeric said. “Losing a sister is no small thing. Were you close?”
I blinked at the personal question. For that, I did need another drink of wine. I took it, long and slow, the disgusting sweetness coating my tongue.
“We were,” I said. It was true. Inessa and I knew each other best. But it was the sort of closeness that caused my feet to bleed during dance lessons: skin enclosed in a pointed toe, rubbing against leather until it tore. “As much as we could be.”
“Ah,” Aeric said. He paused. “The Radixan court is not known as an easy place.”
“No.” It was the first heartfelt, honest thing I’d ever said to him. “It isn’t.”
“Were you sad to leave it behind?”
I took another drink of wine, thinking about the grave flowers raising their heads in grumpy welcome every time I approached, the pungently salty food that had ruined me for other flavors, and the ballroom where part of me was forever chained. Aeric didn’t know it, but he’d struck a tender spot in me, the same sort that made my shoulder ache every time I heard dancing music in remembrance of Rigby’s stick. Radix never gave more than it took. It was the underside of a rock—moist, crawling with phlegm-skinned creatures, dirty and dank. But it never pretended to be anything else. It told you the true cost of love and loss and let you decide for yourself what was worth clinging to.
Whatever I was, I was a Radixan, through and through.
Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time being a Sinet.
“Everyone longs for home,” I deflected. I didn’t wish to speak about myself any longer. “What was it like being raised in a monasterium?”
“Austere.” Now Aeric’s gaze dulled. “Not a pillow in sight, lest comfort bring you into sin … or so they said. I had no pillow, but I still acquired penances faster than a stray dog acquires fleas, so perhaps the theory doesn’t hold.” He smiled congenially, but a wistfulness hung inhis voice. “There were bells. They rang three times a day for the canonical hours. I used to escape to the bell tower often. The bells were like giant mountains nestled together, solemn and restful.”
“Sounds lonely and free, all at once.” I didn’t know what had inspired me to make such a personal inference, yet the way Aeric spoke about the bells reminded me of my grave flowers.
“It was,” Aeric agreed softly.
“What happened to your hands?” My lips were numb with wine, and the question came clumsily from them. Only one of Aeric’s hands was visible to me. It was wrapped around the belly of the chalice, while the other was down at his side. His fingers tightened, as though hiding the damage.
“The monasticte attempted to strap the irreverence out of me.” He spoke vaguely, in the way you might when talking about a misfortune happening far away.
I took another sip, forcing away my guilt over being so insensitive … and the strange urge to take his hands in mine. “It didn’t work.”
“What?” He frowned, confused.
“The attempts to cure your irreverence.” I meant it as a jest, a barb at Aeric’s frivolity during royal mourning, to quell my sympathy for him. But just as my question about his hands had been clumsy, my response was too.
“Perhaps,” he said in the same distant manner, one shoulder lifting in a shrug. Silence pervaded the room. I tightened my own grip on my chalice. “I might ask what happened to your hand as well.”
I fought not to glance down at my scar or to try to hide it away. After Inessa had touched it, it had the look of a fresh cut, and now that glass had torn through it, it was rimmed in pink.
“An unfortunate encounter with a letter opener,” I said. Frustratingly, our conversation had a life of its own despite my efforts to guide it. It wound down different paths, ones I did not wish to tread. Determinedly, I added, “I heard you’ve been rehearsing a play.”
